Ada Robichaux

Soldier slayer of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline (House of Faulkner), known as The Sable Tinder. Craft: Hawthorn Craft.

The family tells a story about Ada Robichaux and a hedge. She was born in 1960 at New Orleans, Louisiana, and died in 2026 of a fall, aged sixty-six, having worked for forty-eight years in the laundry trade, the last thirty-one of them as a supervisor, and, from 1990, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, and the hedge, which still stands at the back of a house near the Industrial Canal, was planted by her. The family book knows her as The Sable Tinder, the black spark that is left in the ash when the fire is supposed to be out, and classes her as a Soldier, a hunter who works by drill, by a post to be held and by orders that mean what they say. Her craft was Hawthorn Craft, the use of hawthorn in stake, hedge and thorn-barrier against the dead, and her gear was a service pistol and a silver-edged knife. She was the elder child of the lineman and slayer Roy Robichaux, The Hard Ford, and of the schoolteacher and slayer Marguerite Faulkner, The Betsy Watch, who was also her mentor, and the sister of Daniel Faulkner, born in 1963, who was not a hunter. She never married and had no children. She was of the House of Faulkner, the Lancastrian line of the Red Ledger, and descended from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486. Her childhood was ruled by two timetables. Her mother taught the fourth grade at a parish school and marked books by lamp, and her father worked the poles by day and the long watches by night, and the house near the Industrial Canal, a narrow frame cottage with a gallery and a pecan tree, was kept running by a system of notes on the icebox door. Ada was a square, dark, quiet child with her father's big hands and her mother's habit of looking at a thing until it confessed. At five, in September 1965, she sat on the gallery rail in the dark with a blanket round her while the water of Hurricane Betsy came up the street, and she saw her father come home at dawn after three days on the poles with a wound weeping through his shirt and his belt still on, and put his hand on her head. She said that it was the first thing she remembered clearly, and that it was warm. Three years later he was dead of the wound that never closed. Marguerite was in her classroom the following Monday, and Ada, who was eight, went with her and sat at the back, because there was nobody else to mind her, and was given a long division and a pencil. The household that Marguerite kept after that was a small barracks. She was a thin, brisk, brown-eyed woman with a ruler in her bag and a pistol in the other, and she brought up the girl and the younger boy by a rule that everything had a post and that a post was to be held. Ada's was the back door. At ten she was taught to close it, check the latch and look at the yard before she looked at the street. At twelve she was given a hawthorn stick, the length of her forearm, with an end cut to a point, and told to carry it, and told why. The family had been planting hawthorn, Marguerite said, since the Faulkners came out of the north of England, for it was a tree that old people trusted: it was the thorn that held a boundary, flowered in May and made a stake that would not split. There was a hawthorn hedge at the back of the cottage, three rows deep, which Marguerite had set in the year of her marriage, and Ada was put to clip it every February. She learned in her teens where to cut it for stakes, how to dry them over the stove, how to bind a thorn-barrier across a door or a culvert so that a thing which came to it would stop, and how to build, with a hedge-knife and a ball of wire, a hedge in a night. It is not a flashy craft. It is the craft of a soldier, who makes the ground that the enemy must cross. She went to the laundry at eighteen, in 1978, as a presser at a large commercial plant on the west bank that did the sheets and uniforms for six hospitals and a dozen hotels. It was run by Simone Delacroix, a laundry supervisor of the old school, who had supervised two thousand women, and who took one look at the big-handed girl at the number-three press and said that she had the makings of a forewoman. Ada rose through the washroom, the sorting floor and the dry-cleaning line and was a supervisor by 1995, when Simone retired at sixty-five and handed her the keys with the remark that a laundry was a battle against entropy and that the girl had the right temperament. She ran it for the rest of her life. She knew from a basket of linen, in the manner of her predecessor, who had been out the night before and how badly it had gone. She also knew that a laundry is a place in which no one notices a visitor, since half the staff are in and out at any hour. For thirty years it was, without anyone being told, a safe house. She was called in the autumn of 1990, after a quarrel, when a brother returned from the grave to finish it. The brother was Alcide Broussard, whom the papers do not count in the family and the family does. He had been a boy of the parish, taken in by Marguerite at eleven when his mother died of a fever, and raised alongside the children in the back room, five years older than Ada, a gentle, restless, humorous young man who worked the river docks and drank on Fridays. Ada, who had no patience for the second, quarrelled with him in the kitchen on a night in October about a loan that he had not repaid and a Friday that he had not come home, and he went out in a temper and was found at the foot of the Industrial Canal lock in the morning. She went to the funeral. On the third night after the burial she was alone in the cottage with the lamp lit, her mother being at a parish meeting, when somebody knocked at the back door and she heard his voice, as he had always said it, asking her to let him in so that they could finish. She did not open the door. She stood with her back to it for an hour, and then she went out through the front, round the house, with a hawthorn stake, and found him on the gallery in his funeral coat, with his hat in his hand and a very bad look in his eyes. It was the first thing she had ever killed, and she told her mother afterwards that she had not been angry any more. Marguerite, who had known for some years that it was coming, took her in hand as a mentor takes a soldier. She drilled her at the back of the school on Saturdays, on the playground, with a stopwatch and a bag of stakes, and gave her a book, which was her own, with a line on the first page that read that the work was not to hate them and not to forget them. Ada took, by the family's count, twenty-seven in thirty-five years, and was never wounded. She did not marry. She said that a woman with a laundry and a post to hold had enough to be going on with. She took her mother's work on to the Red Ledger's second shift, and in 2011, when Marguerite died, aged seventy-six, she carried the coffin on the left side, as a lineman's daughter would, and kept the stakes. The Ledger itself, the book of the line, went to her brother Daniel, who had a restaurant and a head for figures, and she did not mind. She said that a soldier holds the post and a keeper keeps the book, and that she had never in her life had any wish to be the one who wrote things down. Her worst night was in August 2005. Hurricane Katrina broke the floodwalls along the Industrial Canal, and the cottage of her childhood, where Marguerite, then seventy-one, had declined to leave, stood in nine feet of brown water. Ada, who had stayed on the west bank, took a flat boat across the river with two men from the laundry, and found her mother on the roof, with a pistol, a thermos and a bundle of hawthorn stakes, watching a dark shape in the water that had been pushed up the street by the surge. They took the shape off the ridge together before they left. She brought her mother and a neighbour's cat to the laundry, where for six weeks the dryers ran day and night for the Guard, and where she slept on a table. In September 2001 she had stood at the gate of the plant with a clipboard and counted every one of her women in. In the pandemic years she ran the plant with a mask and a ledger of shifts, and it was said that she was the only person in the parish who could count to two hundred and fourteen without moving her lips. She died in the spring of 2026, in her sixty-seventh year, after a fall. She had gone out in the early morning, as she did every day, with a bundle of fresh linen for a cousin in the Channel, and stepped off a broken kerb on Magazine Street, and was taken to the hospital with a hip and a head injury. She lived for six days. Daniel and the cousins sat with her. She asked on the last evening whether somebody had remembered to clip the hedge. It had been done on Tuesday. Ada Robichaux is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Sable Tinder, the laundry supervisor who held a post for thirty-five years with a stake of hawthorn and a clipboard and never once asked to be relieved. In the Slayerverse she stands for the soldiers of the Red Ledger, who made the ground that the dead had to cross and who proved that a hedge, kept faithfully, can be a better wall than a keep.